(Winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize) Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all the living things on the land and the fishes in the sea were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe, in this antic, fantastic history of Tasmania from the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer, forger, fantasist, was condemned to live in the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

"Gould's Book of Fish is a novel about fish the way Moby-Dick is a novel about whales, or Ulysses is a novel about the events of a single day."—NYTimes

"With some memorably eerie writing and cynical comedy ... Gould's Book of Fish gives us a fantasized version of Tasmania's early history."—Daily Telegraph (London)